CU task force studies steep prices for academic journal subscriptions

Kraig Adler, vice provost for life sciences, left, and Wallace Olsen, senior research associate at Mann Library, in the library's Periodical Room. Robert Barker/University Photography

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

Thanks to soaring prices, academic agricultural and biological journals, which for 200 years have been crucial to providing information on advances in biology, food production, plant diseases and animal science, are likely to go the way of the plow horse. That is the view of a Cornell faculty task force that has been studying the problem.

Subscriptions to the 312 research journals studied by the panel are as high as $5,000 a year, and nine of the scholarly journals studied now cost more than $3,000 a year. In 1994, it says, 24 of the 25 highest priced agricultural journals and 26 out of the 30 most expensive biological titles were from commercial publishers, as opposed to university, government and society publishers. The comparison is based on a cost-per-printed-character and a cost-per-page analysis.

"If subscriptions continue to rise at their present rate, the end result will be the extinction of many journals, because they will no longer be commercially viable, and drastic reductions in scope of many university library journal collections," said Kraig Adler, Cornell vice provost for life sciences, professor of biology and chair of the task force.

As prices increase beyond inflation, the study notes, more libraries are being forced to cut journal subscriptions.

"The costs of the journals are then spread out over an ever-decreasing number of institutions at still-higher prices that even fewer institutions can afford," Adler said.

"Once we stripped away the cost of living, adjusted for the American dollar, compared the prices to journals in other categories using the same printing companies and factored out all the usual arguments, we found that the remaining motive for escalating costs of commercial publications was profit," he said.

The task force report, "Price Study of Core Agricultural and Biological Journals," was written by Wallace C. Olsen, a senior research associate at Cornell's Albert R. Mann Library. Also on the task force were Cornell professors Martin Alexander, soils; Gerald F. Combs, nutrition; Nelson Hairston, ecology; Harold Hintz, animal science; Kenneth Horst, plant pathology; Betty Lewis, nutrition; Donald Rutz, entomology; and Christopher Wien, fruit and vegetable science.

How can faculty combat the escalating subscriptions trend? The report suggests that researchers could decide not to submit articles to high-priced journals, and university researchers could withhold their editorial services from the journals. Academics, it says, must be aware of the implications of their publishing patterns and the subsequent costs to the institutions and their readers.

The report finds that price jumps have forced university libraries to cut their subscriptions, particularly of those journals with extraordinary price increases. It says that researchers and scholars are beginning to find their usual printed resources reduced, and smaller libraries -- like those at community colleges -- borrow more expensive titles through interlibrary loans, which places even greater resource stress on larger university libraries, particularly the large agricultural libraries at the nation's land-grant schools.

The Cornell panel studied price changes in 312 core agricultural and biological journal subscription prices between 1988 and 1994. During that period, on a price-per-page basis, the prices of the agricultural journals increased by 64.7 percent for all titles. The prices of agricultural journals from commercial publishers increased as much as 77.8 percent, and those published by scientific societies and associations increased by 33.3 percent.

The average cost of biology journals rose by 35.5 percent over the same period. Commercial biology journals were again at the high end, with a 36.8 percent increase, and university biology journals at the low end, with an average 25.8 percent rise.

The full 50-page report is available online, including charts showing pricing details of the journals the group studied, at http://adam.mannlib.cornell.edu/jps/jps.htm.